How billboards advertise at high altitudes

Kathryn Rem

Monday

Jul 23, 2012 at 12:01 AMJul 23, 2012 at 11:16 PM

With a midday temperature of 101 degrees and the sun so bright it was impossible to avoid squinting, Joe Felchner was unfazed as he prepared to climb 36 feet to change the message on the first of five advertising billboards he was slated to tackle on a recent Thursday.

With a midday temperature of 101 degrees and the sun so bright it was impossible to avoid squinting, Joe Felchner was unfazed as he prepared to climb 36 feet to change the message on the first of five advertising billboards he was slated to tackle on a recent Thursday.

“The hardest part is climbing up and down,” he said as he hoisted a ladder from his work van and secured it next to a steel billboard mounting pole on Sangamon Avenue in Springfield, Ill.

“The most I’ve done in a day was 20. That was a hard day,” said Felchner, who also works as a paramedic for American Ambulance Co.

Installing and changing billboard messages is a skill few people have, but those who do the job say it’s simple if prescribed steps are followed.

Felchner was working that day with Dustin Pinkley. The two men removed an old ad for Marine Bank and replaced it with a new message for the same company in about 25 minutes. In his seven years as an installer for Mid-America Advertising, Felchner estimates he’s changed the face on thousands of billboards. He averages five to 12 a day.

Assembling an outdoor ad

The road from concept to billboard begins with an ad design.

“We want it simple, bold and eye-catching,” said Jeff Stauffer, co-owner of 19-year-old Mid-America Advertising, which has offices in Springfield, Ill., and Collinsville, Ill. The company has 549 billboards in the region.

“If you’re going 70 mph on the interstate, you have five to seven seconds to see the sign. The best ad would have a photo or image and seven words or less,” Stauffer said.

He got into the business after he graduated in 1989 from MacMurray College with degrees in criminal justice and economics. He was offered a job rebuilding 10 dilapidated wooden billboards in Missouri, after which he started building his own structures.

“It would take us three days to build a sign. Now we hire a company. It takes about 1 1/2 days,” he said. When Stauffer started, billboard messages were hand-painted on paper.

Finding land for billboards isn’t easy, due to a panoply of laws and regulations affecting the industry.

Mid-America has been successful in getting signs in rural markets.

“We’re kind of the Casey’s of the outdoor business. We have luck in small towns,” Stauffer said.

The placement of billboards is determined largely by traffic counts. Ideally, a board should have at least 5,000 vehicles driving past the location daily.

“In the city of Springfield, it’s not unusual for most of our signs to have 25,000 to 35,000 vehicles a day go past,” said Mike Baietto, Mid-America’s operations manager. A college roommate of Stauffer’s, Baietto began his career in management with United Parcel Service, but got into the outdoor ad business while helping Stauffer build his early billboard structures.

Mid-America’s cost for posting a billboard message in Springfield runs about $700 to $1,000 per month.

Billboard ads take several forms. Among them are image ads (think of a picture of Pepsi on ice), directional ads (“Exit 18A — Motel 6”), safety awareness ads (“Click it or ticket” for seat belt use) and event ads (for a fair, festival or other happening).

At Mid-America, the ad itself is either designed in-house or submitted by the client. The artwork is sent to Circle Graphics in Longmont, Colo., which imprints the design with an inkjet printer on heavy-gauge vinyl.

Billboard faces vary in size. In cities, 10.5 by 36 feet is common; on highways, the size might zoom to 20 by 60 feet.

Once the printed vinyl is received by Mid-America, it is installed within five days.

To get the vinyl on the billboard’s face, installers climb to the top of the structure and remove the old ad. With a rope, they hoist up the folded new vinyl — which weighs about 50 pounds — and drape it over the space to be covered. They slide metal rods into pockets on all four sides of the vinyl, and then attach the rods securely to the face with S-hooks, making sure the ad is not crooked and there are no wrinkles.

“You can’t be afraid of heights,” said installer Pinkley, who works with Felcher at American Ambulance as an emergency medical technician and has been working at Mid-America for six months.

When the installers are done, they drop the old ad to the ground, climb down and fold up the used vinyl. Sometimes the client wants to keep the old vinyl ad, and sometimes it is sold to roofers, who use it as a tarp.

The final step is taking a photo of the newly changed billboard for the client. Stauffer said most messages stay in place six to 12 months, but some highway boards are unchanged for up to five years.

“On the highway, we like to change the vinyl out every two or three years to keep the message crisp,” Stauffer said.

Rain, snow and cold weather normally don’t stop billboard installs, but the elements do play a role.

“Wind is the only thing that gets in the way,” Felchner said.

“There’s been a time or two it took off my hard hat,” Pinkley added.

Birds are another concern. Sometimes they suddenly come flying out of the structure, startling the installers. The platform under the face is usually covered with bird droppings, which makes it slippery, and it’s often littered with dead birds.

“We always wear gloves,” Pinkley said. “It can be nasty up there.”

History of outdoor advertising

1835: The first large outdoor poster in America debuted in New York when Jared Bell printed one for a circus.

1850: Exterior advertising was first used on street railways.

1867: The first leasing of billboards was recorded.

1872: The International Bill Posters’ Association of North America was formed in St. Louis.

1900: A standardized billboard structure created in the U.S. ushered in a boom of national billboard campaigns. Big advertisers such as Palmolive, Kellogg and Coca-Cola began mass-producing outdoor messages from coast to coast.

1934: The industry established the Traffic Audit Bureau to provide advertisers with data to determine outdoor audience size.

1958: Congress passed the first federal legislation to voluntarily control billboards along Interstate highways. The law was known as the Bonus Act because states were given bonus incentives to control signs.

1965: President Lyndon Johnson signed the Highway Beautification Act into law. It controlled billboards on Interstate and some primary highways by limiting them to commercial and industrial areas and by requiring states to set size, lighting and spacing standards.

1970s: Billboard companies commissioned research on the creation of messages by computer. Ultimately, this led to computer painting on vinyl.